Howls and Distant Sounds

A Perpetual State of Fatal Narcolepsy

You open your eyes to the sight of faint light coming through the crevices of your bedroom window. That can only mean two things: it’s only almost sunrise, and you’ve beaten your morning alarm – congratulations.

For a brief moment you think how good the sheets feel against your skin, but your body insists on getting up right away. Gotta beat the everyday morning hustle.

You sit up on the edge of your bed, and become immediately convinced that you have a balloon for a head. By this time, you don’t have to wonder or even look at your calendar – you know perfectly well that it’s a Monday. It’s (mostly) only on Mondays that you go through the day with a lightheadedness that constantly hovers over your head, the way a pesky fly does over rotting meat.

“You’ve been sleeping a lot, haven’t you?” You hear your friend ask you the weekend before. “It’s my only chance for escape,” you remember saying in reply, not realizing that your redemption is exactly your incarceration — you’ve been living all of your life in such a perpetual state of fatal narcolepsy.

The next thing you know, you’re waiting at the bus stop for your morning ride to work. And the next thing you know, you’re sitting through a very boring mancom meeting at work. And the next thing you know, you’re stuck in the rush hour traffic on your way home. And the next thing you know, you’re asleep even before your head hits your pillow. You realize that you don’t remember what actually happens in between these points. That happens a lot, you think to yourself. You’re hardly ever truly present in any of the moments in your life.

You have brief moments of lucidness, but mostly you’re just drifting. And that’s pretty much how you go through each day, each week, each month, until many years have passed, and with much regret you entertain the possibility that perhaps there’s a tad more sobriety and a tad more life in a rotten corpse than in you.

And then, you start to tell every single person you run into to refuse to live the kind of life you’ve lived. You try to convince them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That we are not designed for such a dreadful life. That this isn’t all there is to it. That we are all made for more, and there actually is more to life than just going through the motions and striving for poorly fabricated, empty things. That we ought to embrace rather than escape life.